The boys and girls of summer

You laugh, but the two share a lot: the long grueling season, late summer nights, beaucoup numbers, dreams of past glory come October. And as the first spending bills roll out, no dream’s bigger than repeating that championship pennant run of 1996.

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Just as today, 1996 followed on a disastrous government shutdown. And Republicans in Congress worked then with a Democratic White House to make amends by passing before Oct. 1 all of the annual bills required to keep agencies operating for the next 12 months.

It wasn’t always pretty. Seven bills sailed on their own steam. The remaining six were wrapped into a foot-high measure literally carted across the Capitol on a Saturday evening after marathon talks in the offices of then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). But it raises the question: Could this happen again this summer? And if not, why not?

Like grizzled managers on the dugout steps, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) swear it won’t be for lack of trying.

“We’re going to go straight ahead until we’re shot dead,” says Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Mikulski, his Senate counterpart, channels the Old Testament — and a little Russell Crowe.

“1996 is the model,” she says, admitting that multibill packages must be part of the process to get the job done. “I don’t know how many will be one by one, but with the popularity of Noah, I might be doing it as two-by-twos,” she laughs. When a reporter looks clueless, she snaps: “Noah! You know, the Bible guy!”

Indeed, Rogers is off to the earliest start of any House Appropriations chairman in decades. Two subcommittee markups are scheduled for Thursday, a full committee session next week. Already Wednesday morning, his staff released a 64-page draft bill providing $71.5 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction accounts for the coming year.

This is all before the Congressional Budget Office has even completed its score of President Barack Obama’s requests. And Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s latest 10-year budget plan, unveiled Tuesday? It might as well not exist.

In many ways, it doesn’t.

That’s no insult to the ambitious young Budget Committee chairman, who remains a major force. But for all the headlines he generates, his currency is in political visions — not making real law right now. And the grittier work of appropriations bills in Rogers’s domain will do more to decide if House Republicans can prove they’ve learned to govern before November’s elections.

Ryan helped set up this test, in fact, when he worked out the two-year budget agreement last December on discretionary spending caps. Regardless of what happens in next week’s House budget debate, Rogers and Mikulski already have what they need most: a clear division of defense vs. domestic spending within the $1.014 trillion target set for fiscal 2015, which begins Oct. 1.

There are sure to be tussles between competing priorities. But the caps are so tight — a virtual freeze at current appropriations levels — that there isn’t enough room to manufacture the huge disparities of recent years.

The White House would like more, for sure. But Obama’s March budget request complies with the caps while shifting around several billion dollars within the estimated $492 billion allocated for nondefense spending.

The annual labor, health and education bill is a clear winner, for example, together with a much smaller Treasury bill funding the IRS and financial regulators important to Wall Street reforms. Increased spending for Commerce is offset by tapping more into surplus dollars in a crime victims fund in the Justice Department. New aviation fees and an optimistic projection for housing receipts help to moderate expenditures elsewhere. But real cuts are proposed for the bills impacting homeland security, agriculture and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Rogers is holding his cards tight: “I don’t want you to get into my business here,” he laughs. But he can be expected to go in a different direction from the president in many cases when he allocates funds among his 12 subcommittees.

For example, the giant labor, health and education budget — which is important to Obama’s prekindergarten initiatives — will almost certainly be a target for cuts. That, in turn, can give Rogers extra dollars for firefighting and water projects important to his Western conservatives, for example. He’s already served notice that he will oppose the administration’s new aviation fees. Depending on how much he cuts from the president’s health dollars, Rogers can backfill this hole in the homeland security bill he once managed.

These are real policy differences with real consequences. But the dollars at stake amount to less than 5 percent of the total. “The swings aren’t that big … We’ll meet in the middle,” says Rogers. And he and Mikulski are already a big step ahead of their 1996 predecessors, who were still laboring at this stage under continuing resolutions left over from the shutdown crisis in December 1995.

Looking back, the whole 1996 experience is a revelation of how a hostile Congress and a White House once actually functioned together. And what’s been lost in the years since.

Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) showed an active interest in what appropriations could mean to everyday people. Lott’s passion for deal making — after taking the reins from then-presidential candidate Bob Dole — was an immense asset. And the White House directly engaged behind Leon Panetta, President Bill Clinton’s budget director and a man fresh enough from Congress to be known by his old colleagues.

“My message is it can be done if the leadership decides it’s in the country’s interest to restore regular order,” says former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), who chaired the House Appropriations panel at the time. “It takes leadership, it takes time, and it takes determination,” adds Lott.